itch.io

Hi Marthe!

Development on Project Perfect Citizen has stopped, and is very unlikely to resume.  It was completed as our team's capstone project in college, and we all graduated in June of 2016 and have since gone on to our separate careers and no longer live in close proximity.

There is always the possibility of one of the team members picking it up again, possibly in a different framework, but I wouldn't count on it.  If you enjoyed PPC, you can check out the similarly themed Orwell series.

Thanks!

There's a picture of her crib somewhere.

Glad you enjoyed the twist!

We're very happy you like our game so much! There has been some work on new levels, but most work has been halted over the summer. When we decide to resume work on the game, we'll let you guys know (so long as you follow the game on itch.io)!

Not at all. Be sure to send us a link when you finish!

There is a family tree in the files that can be used. Pictures csn also contain the answers. Good luck!

P.S. Don't forget to check your email

It's often a good place to start!

That is unfortunate....Are you sure you used proper capitalization? Your save should be found in the resources/saves folder of your installation directory.

Mac or Windows?

You'll see red pairs of letters and numbers on some pictures in that folder. The letters in these pairs make up the password.

The crash is actually the ending. Depending on the choices you make in the final level it's supposed to represent being detained by the DCPS, or that the protagonist is now investigating your own desktop.

We're sorry the save broke. You can use [Alt] + [.] to skip desktops if you just need to recreate a save file. You can use this to skip to Extraction levels and recreate your submission scores by submitting similarly scored files on each level.

we're not sure what the problem is. Are you having troubles finding the game on your computer? Or is it just not running?

is your issue fixed TimeWarp?

We will look into this as soon as possible. For now, feel free to edit PPC.sav in the Resources/Saves folder to manually change resolution settings. You may also use F5 to swap in and out of full screen at run time.

Are you talking about the Family Documents folder in the politician desktop? Its asking for "dads old adage" which is a saying. Thats weird about your crash/bug though. Ill have the guys take a look at it.

I asked one of the programmers, he said that it should just load from the last desktop. If that doesn't work you might have to play part of the game over. Keep in mind there are two different desktops for desktop two depending on what you do in desktop one. You can also get a different ending depending on what you do in the final desktop as well.

So far as we're aware, there should be no problems running the game on a Windows 7 machine, so your problem is likely not caused by your choice of OS. We should be launching an updated version of our Windows installer soon which might remedy your problem. Might you be able to tell us your resolution?

You should always try starting your search for passwords and critical information in the inbox. We usually start of our breadcrumb trail there.

it should just be "I am guilty"

Our best guess is that this may be a result of image overflow. Try rebooting the game and reloading your save. If your save does not work, you can use [Alt] + [.] to skip the current desktop, although you should be sure to flag the appropriate files in the teacher desktop as your score will determine which level 2 you will proceed to.

This is not a stupid question, in fact it is perfectly reasonable to ask this (after all, we've developed a game encouraging people think critically about privacy and security).

The answer however, is no. Project Perfect Citizen does not have that type of access to your files or the capabilities to do that type of networking. We don't want to say too much for fear of giving away part of the story but there is a small feature toward the end of the game that uses an internet connection (its not a requirement to play the game, but if an internet connection is available it does something really cool and integrates it into the narrative). It's likely that Nortan is just being overly cautious (and there is nothing wrong with that), but this isn't something to be concerned about.

We hope you get to play Project Perfect Citizen! Let us know if you have any more questions.

We're very glad you enjoyed it. More to come!

You can actually choose to submit nothing if you like.

Thats actually the ending. Its supposed to "crash like that"

Hey blinddoctor, glad you enjoyed our game! I wanted to take the time to respond to you considering you took the time to critique our game. I'm not going to cover "The Good" because you pretty much nailed what we were trying to invoke , but I wanted to at least go over my thoughts (as one of the designers) in regards to your suggestions and observations/ideas.

• The 'connect character portraits' bit lost its appeal fairly quickly for me and seems irrelevant to the rest of the player's work. The slightly-varied recycled text contributed to this feeling.
  • The purpose of the "Pipeline Extraction" as we like to call it is to set up context for the following level. The content in this segment is procedurally generated. The tool we use for the text is extremely powerful, but has quite a learning curve. Future versions of the "generative grammars" these levels use will avoid a lot of the repetition. Interestingly, the procedural generation itself is a lot deeper behind the scenes than what is exposed during the levels. We have plans to build upon the mechanics of these levels to make the puzzles more interesting and varied.
• The ending I received, a crash-to-desktop after an alert, was confusing. I understand the team is expanding on this in future updates however. I completely missed the clue about the latest investigative target being "closer to home" than previous targets.
  • During development when we came up with this ending, we quickly realized that people have this assumption, albeit appropriate, that any program quitting unexpectedly means that it crashed. We've tossed around a few ideas on how we can make this clearer, but as it stands right now, the ending is unfortunately in a state where the player has this really cool "whoa" moment if they understand what just happened, or terrible "uhhh, what just happened?" moment if they don't. Definitely something we're going to be iterating on.
• Perhaps the result of a smaller design team, but I'd suggest waiting on a few more cases of morally-difficult decisions before getting into the "My company may be bad" storyline.
  • PPC in its current form was initially completed as a student project for the UCSC Game Design program as the capstone of our senior year. There's a lot of flexibility in the program, but we chose to build our own engine in addition to making the game. As a part of the class requirements we had to release the game by the end of the year, so our focus was on putting together a version that was a cohesive, complete experience. We definitely agree that the ending is somewhat abrupt, but that will be rectified as well add more levels in the future.
• It'd be neat to learn later into the story's progression that many forensic tools exist via command-line, allowing more depth of investigation AND replay-ability as old cases may contain new information.
  • This was also something we had originally planned on doing during development. Scope issues for the aforementioned reasons and the realization that not everyone knows how to use a command line (we didn't want people who didn't know how to use one to miss out on content), kept us from implementing it. This is something we may consider doing in the future though.
• While it didn't detract from the experience, I suggest including more "fluff" (emails, journals, etc) to make the targets seem even more believable and to require more careful investigation during each case.
  • It's funny you mention this because this is probably one of the most difficult challenges in designing levels in our game. When we first started playtesting our levels, we had lots of fluff like you said. Pictures, documents, books, ect. We had initially assumed that realism was the most important part of creating a level, and that we wanted to really make a desktop seem like it could belong to a real person. While this sounds great in theory, in practice it was confusing for the player. Players often became lost, disoriented or even bored at our game if they realized they had a massive amount of files to comb through, many of which were simply fluff. We quickly realized that we needed to sacrifice some realism to in order to make our game feel and play better. Finding the right balance of realism and gameplay is still something we will iterating in future levels.
• The spelling/grammar mistakes were a nice touch, even if not intentional.
  • Some were definitely on purpose, others not so much. I mean, ... its all by design ;)

Again, thank you very much for taking the time to critique our game, it really means the world to us!

-Andy from Bad Cop Studios

You game is saved at the start of every level. To load your save, simply enter the same name you created your game with.

No problem! Thanks for your interest in Project Perfect Citizen!

Thanks for playing! This forum is certainly an appropriate place for feedback, we're very interested in and curious about what players have to say about Project Perfect Citizen.

Please try this update from Microsoft https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.a...

It looks like the .dll you're missing is a part of the Visual C++ package.

At the moment, nope!

Hey bobdasquid,

Try looking at the pictures of the fireworks and seeing what you can piece together from those =] .

Hey walrus1,

The chat program isn't used. You will be able to beat the level without it. Try opening "my files" and starting from there.

Thanks for letting us know.

What kind of specs does your computer have?

That's intentional. Congratulations, you finished all that we have so far. There are multiple endings to our game, but all end in a crash back to your desktop. In theory, our goal was to get the player to engage in some reflective analysis specific to their ending, but this has been labeled as confusing by a number of players. In future content updates (in which we hope to add more levels!), we will likely rewrite this ending a bit to fix the ambiguity of the "crash". Thanks for playing, we're glad you've enjoyed Project Perfect Citizen so far!

What is your resolution? That may be a source of problems....

Glad you've enjoyed playing so far! Of all the folders you've listed above, you must first open the contributions folder. Vincent's home town is Dallas. Once you've found the list of contributors, re-visit the email where they discuss his private server. The next clue is there.

As for a walkthrough, we hadn't thought about that yet, but if enough people have trouble and want help it may be something we consider doing.

The updated version of the game unfortunately can not recover your old progress on its own, however we can create a save file for you that will allow you to begin where you left off. Please describe the last part of the game you remember playing and we'll send you a save file and a guide for loading it into the game.

Based on the game progress you've described, I've created a save file that should put you back where you left off.

Your save file can be downloaded HERE

Also please refer to the guide I've written for updating save files in the game: Guide For Updating Save Files

Let me know if you get stuck on any of the steps in the guide.